Celebrity and Its Discontents

By

Dorothy Rabinowitz

Updated Dec. 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. ET

"Dirt," the slick and entertaining new FX series (begins Tuesday, 10-11 p.m. EST) about life at a gossip tabloid, has a lot on its mind -- too much perhaps, in which category you can count its forays into female psychology, sexual dysfunction, the vanity of ambition and other silliness. Even so, by the time episode one has puffed to its end it's clear that "Dirt" is about to become irresistible, not least for its picture of the celebrity world and its strange relationship with the tabloids that can wreak such havoc on careers with their reports on scandals false or true, exclusives about stars secretly carted off to the drug rehab center, and much, much worse. They can, in their way, also promote careers.

Tuesday's pilot introduces, among others, Holt (Josh Stewart), a once serious young actor and now a has-been hungry for work who agrees to deliver the deepest-held secret of a hot starlet (and close friend) to the editors of the tabloid (named "Dirt") in exchange for career-burnishing coverage for himself. The starlet's life turns to ashes, and -- thanks to the puff piece about him -- her betrayer is soon scoring job offers. It's not exactly "Rosemary's Baby," of course -- Holt is quickly undone by paralyzing guilt. Moreover, the devil to whom he sold his friend is a woman, the beautiful, single-minded killer of an editor in chief, Dirt's Lucy Spiller, a character Courteney Cox portrays with her usual glitzy, if depthless, charm.

This isn't, to be sure, an enterprise concerned with depths, Lucy's or those of anyone else -- it's a broad, sharply drawn take on the struggles to the death for celebrity pictures, stories and fresh scandal that are central to the lives and success of the tabloids.

Episode two regales us with the plight of an unbearable Hollywood glamour couple. Blair Marshall and Logan Hix, apparently about to become parents of a newborn wonderfully named -- whether by the pursuing reporters or parents to be isn't clear -- "Blogan." No couple has ever been so controlling about their pregnancy pictures, Lucy and staff complain amid the growing media frenzy. (Ms. Cox had her own experience with packs of photographers focused on her pregnancy and so brings a certain authority to this part of the story.)

Amid all the fun here, there is a strange thread of preachiness woven around and about the character of Dirt's editor in chief, who has focused her life's energies and all her passion on success at her job -- a woman not especially concerned to have it all, or have, indeed, anything not related to her primary concern. Namely, business.

After one not entirely successful sexual encounter, she sends the unhappy man off with a kiss, despite his entreaties to stay, pointing out that she still has hours of work left to finish. "You're just like a guy," comes his bitter judgment. Another angry male tells her he imagined her alone in her expensive home, "with nothing to hold but your latest issue." Topping all that off, the series' creators also make plain the kind of sexual defect that results from drives to succeed like Lucy's. Plenty of punishment here, in short, for a woman whose work and success obsession is just like a guy's. At the end of episode three, the moment of her highest professional triumph Lucy is not surprisingly shown wandering forlornly around her empty, expensive house -- there's nothing subtle about this -- just as the angry male envisioned.

That moment of highest triumph has been secured through the wondrous character who holds this series together -- Lucy's chief soldier, agent of deception and expert sneak photographer, Don Konkey, masterfully portrayed here by Ian Hart.

Don is supposed to be a schizophrenic, a functioning one, as he informs people -- a role Mr. Hart informs with so much skill and variety it's hard to wait for his next scene. His success in carrying off this derangement of many colors doesn't altogether make up for klunky spots in the writing -- there are those pointless and persistent visions that appear to him, of a dead actress -- but Mr. Hart's Don manages to get past those, too, with minimal trouble. He's at his best relating to his dead cat, which he does with dignified, if tormented, sincerity -- and at feats like getting into the impossibly well guarded hospital quarters of a star in hiding and snapping her picture. All this he can accomplish under bombardment from hallucinations, with voices nattering in his head, and after mixing all his medications at will. His character could conceivably bring objections from the mental-disability establishment, but it should bring nothing but gratitude from the producers of this series, toward whose likely success he will have contributed mightily.

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To appreciate the "American Masters" portrait "Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens" (airing Wednesday, 9-10:30 p.m. EST, on PBS; check local listings), it's best to zip quickly through the opening jumble of fevered celebrity testimonials to the photographer. We've become accustomed to these in "American Masters" profiles of late, though the chorus of pure reverential blather with which the Leibovitz film begins seems to mark a new high. Fortunately, the portrait moves on after a time from this incoherence, becoming a substantial account of the photographer's early life and family, including the years on the road with Rolling Stone magazine, which ended with her recognition that she should avail herself of a rehab facility and prepare for re-entry into the real world. The most engaging aspects of this film by the photographer's sister, Barbara Leibovitz, are, needless to say, those that deliver the subject herself, holding forth at length about her life and work, which she does with affecting eloquence.

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